Jurassic World: Rebirth
Directed by Gareth Edwards (2025)
Sigh. This is the seventh Jurassic Park movie, I think? Gareth Edwards does his damndest to inject some awe back into this fossilized franchise, but any goodwill is quickly buried under the weight of a David Koepp script. Once again it's riddled with uninteresting characters, dumb decisions, and plots that feel either reheated or completely irrelevant.
Set five years after Dominion, the dinosaurs have apparently migrated to the equator for reasons. Temperature, climate, something like that. It's just lazy plot nonsense. Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) leads a team of elite operatives to the most dangerous place on Earth, an abandoned research facility tied to the original Jurassic Park, on a mission to retrieve dinosaur DNA that could allegedly save lives. With her is Duncan (Mahershala Ali), the crew’s captain and the only character with any real presence, and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who’s mostly just there to identify which dinosaurs they need blood from.
Meanwhile, a Spanish family is capsized by some mutant dino off the island’s coast. They're rescued, only for their ship to be destroyed and most of the crew wiped out. Now both groups are stranded and looking for a facility to call for help. Saying this is a repeat of The Lost World feels redundant, so I won't even bring it up.
What works? The leads. Johansson and Ali seem to care, or at least do a good job pretending to, and they sell their paper-thin characters with as much energy as the material allows. I also actually gave a shit about the Spanish family surviving, which is more than I can say for most of the franchise's recent attempts at emotional stakes.
But the rest? It's all green screen. A digital blur. Remember when the dinosaurs had weight, presence, and actually felt real back in 1993? That’s long gone. The score is fine, but only because it borrows heavily from John Williams' original themes. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
Sure, this might be the least worst of the Jurassic World entries. But the bar is so low it’s basically fossilized.
Rating: C-
